ship played a small role by ferrying the government's commander-in-chief and his staff to nearby Nagasaki in March 1874. Later that year she hosted the Home Minister Ōkubo Toshimichi. On 5 March 1875 the Emperor visited Ryūjō while in Yokosuka Naval Arsenal to attend the launching of the unprotected corvette . From 13 April 1876 to 27 July, the ship visited Vladivostok, Russia, and various ports in Korea. She was in Kobe when the Satsuma Rebellion began in February 1877 and Ryūjō played a minor role in putting down the rebellion. The ship ran aground on a rock in Kagoshima Bay during a storm on 26 October and was not refloated until 15 May 1878. Towed by the sloop-of-war to Yokosuka on 24–29 July, repairs were not completed until 1880. On 30 October she became a training ship of the Imperial Naval Academy. Her first training cruise was a voyage to Australia in 1881 and she was transferred to the Tōkai Naval Station in Yokohama on 7 April 1882. The ship made a second long-distance navigational training voyage from 19 December to 15 October 1883 that visited Wellington, New Zealand, Valparaíso, Chile, Callao, Peru, and Honolulu, Kingdom of Hawai'i. The ship had to stop in Honolulu because 169 crewmen (of a crew of 376) had developed beriberi and were unfit to continue, of which 23 died. Takaki Kanehiro, a naval physician, had been investigating the possible causes of beriberi over the previous several years and had developed a theory that it was the result of some sort of dietary deficiency, possibly protein. Trained in epidemiological methods during his medical training in London, Takaki was able to persuade the navy to experiment with a new, higher-protein diet and send the training ship following an identical itinerary to minimise the variables. That ship departed Japan on 3 February 1884 and return on 16 November, with her crew only developing 14 cases of beriberi among the 333 crewmen. Further investigation revealed that the crew members who had not followed the new diet were the only ones who developed beriberi. The IJN adopted the new diet across the board and eliminated the disease in a few years. Ryūjō steamed from Shinagawa on 26 December 1884 for a cruise off the coast of Korea. From 1 February 1887 to 11 September, she made a third long-distance navigational training voyage to Australia and Hawaii. When the